Alibaba and Grameen to launch microfinance for startups
by (09/10/09 23:59)
By Huang Daohen
“Money and wealth are two different concepts,” Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group, told his 15,000 employees at the comny’s 10th anniversary earlier this month.“If you have money but have not used it to elevate your own or other people’s happiness, then you may very well only possess a lot of symbols and a mountain of very colorful pies of paper.”Ma is backing up his words with action. On September 24, Ma unveiled his plan with Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning founder of Grameen Bank, to launch a program that provides microcredit financial services to the poor for startup projects.
Desperate for loans
Zhou Xiulian, a woman from a rural area of Sichuan Province, has recently become quite worried about her business. Zhou, 26, runs a duck factory and has been desperate for a loan to continue her business. She constantly updates her loan request at wokai.org, a lending Web site, but has so far come away frustrated.
Zhou is typical of most rural women in remote areas. When she was 18 she got married to a man of the same age in the village. The husband’s family lived with them and put them in debt, so the young couple had to become migrant wokers. Zhou said they had been to Guangzhou and Shenzhen becoming arriving in Beijing.
After four years, they managed to pay off their debt and were able to save a little money to start a duck business back in Sichuan. Zhou bought a number of ducks, but after three months, due to unpreventable circumstances, they were all dead.
